This past week, LAU hosted the Arab Popular Culture Conference. On Friday at 2pm, Session 10 was taking place at the Irwin conference hall. The session was divided into two parts: Features of Online Love Stories in the Gulf given by Nele Lenze; Relationship Between Satellite TV and the Phone in Egypt given by Iman Hamam.
Nele Lenze discussed two online love stories. The first was about two girls whose car breaks down and they decide to take a cab. Now the cab driver is the owner of the cab company, however his car broke down so he took one of his company cabs. When he spots the two girls, he pretends to be an Indian cab driver and drives them. He even fakes an accent. One of the girls forgets her phone in the cab and ends up having to meet up with the cab driver. And then forgets her phone once again. In the end, they fall in love and get married. The second story is about a man who goes to a book store and he buys a book and finds a love letter. The letter tells him that if he wishes to continue correspondence, he should sell the book back to the book store and then come back and buy it later because she would've bought it, left another note and sold it back. This goes on for quite some time and eventually the man finds out that it is the book seller writing the love letters in order to keep his business going.
The stories were entertaining and covered taboo subjects like the mixing between the genders and the communication. There wasn't much to agree with or disagree with in this lecture, because she barely covered anything. She just read two stories and talked about what they had in common. That was it. There was no interaction with the audience and there were barely any questions besides "how old are the writers?" and the reply was that they vary from 15 to 30 years
Iman Hamam talked about the relationship between sms and satellite tv. How there are channels dedicated to viewers just sending in smses all hours of the day and then displaying them on the tv, so that it is one giant conversation on tv. She compared this interaction to the porn peep shows in the 1950's, although I didn't quite understand the comparison at all..I enjoyed her presentation but her comparison didn't make much sense. Yes there is an obsession with texting into the channels, but it's not worldwide. I never saw anything like this in any European countries nor in the Americas.
The whole hhtp://live.lausocial.com coverage of the event was so exciting! I knew exactly what was going on in the conference without actually attending most of the sessions (I only attended and tweeted two sessions). A bystander in the 10th session asked what I was doing and I showed her how we were covering the event live and she was actually quite impressed.
I didn't see any user engagement, or maybe it was because I didn't know where they were commenting? I don't know. I tweeted about the live coverage and put links on facebook as well, I don't know what more I could've done..
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